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Using ‘Hate’ Label with Crimes against Cops Goes Too Far

If you wanted to bring the whole concept of hate crimes into
disrepute, you couldn’t do a better job than the city of Red
Wing, Minn., and the national police union it’s listening to.
According to the Star Tribune’s report, “the
picturesque town on the banks of the Mississippi River is believed
to be the second place in the nation — and the first city
— to pass” a resolution “calling for crimes
against law enforcement to be prosecutable as hate
crimes.”

The national Fraternal Order of Police union, which has been
pushing ideas along these lines for more than a decade, describes
the goal as to “honor the lives lost” in lethal attacks
on police (which in fact — a fact not always reported —
are at near-historic lows).

To a large extent, hate-crime laws function as a type of
feel-good law meant to send a symbolic message of support to
politically active minorities, typically by attaching extra
penalties to conduct that is already criminal and readily subject
to prosecution.

The enhancement applies to crimes committed with some but not
other hateful or vicious motivations. This is part of why critics
argue that the laws in effect play favorites, departing from the
spirit of equal protection under law that aims at treating all
victims of personal assault as equally important.

The effort may be
feel-good symbolism, but there’s no reason to prosecute violence
against law enforcement officers this way.

Because they seem to put an official public seal on a narrative
of oppression, such laws are also lobbied for in me-too fashion by
other groups that rightly or wrongly see themselves as
oppressed.

It is common for hate-crime laws to create multiple jeopardy at
different court levels arising from a single offense, which is
often considered a danger to liberty, even if courts do not always
find that it formally violates the Bill of Rights’ double
jeopardy clause. But defenders of these laws argue that local
authorities in many parts of the country long refused to take
seriously crimes against certain scorned or disenfranchised
minorities, thus in their view justifying a second layer of
prosecutorial attention.

But there’s no evidence that authorities now or in the
past have brushed off lethal attacks on police as something not
worth investigating or prosecuting.

Up to now, proponents of hate-crime laws have emphasized that
they are not intended to kick in every time someone gets victimized
across racial (or religious or sexual-orientation) lines. Quite the
contrary. They apply only when — to quote the FBI — a
crime is “motivated in whole or in part by an
offender’s bias against a race, religion” or other
protected category.

That is one reason only a tiny share of cross-religious,
cross-racial and cross-gender assaults wind up being prosecuted as
hate crimes. People on the front lines of vulnerability to stranger
violence — private security guards, taxi drivers, liquor
store clerks — have jobs that may put them in harm’s
way, but hate-crime law is very unlikely to apply should they join
the roll of grim statistics.

As even the Fraternal Order of Police seems sometimes to
concede, the great majority of harms inflicted on police on duty
— whether it be when a drunk fights back against an arrest, a
cornered wrongdoer tries shooting his way to escape or a high-speed
chase ends in a crash — have nothing to do with any supposed
prejudicial animus against cops.

Yes, extending the law as Red Wing or the union would like to do
would be symbolic as a gesture — deeply so. But what would it
symbolize? The merely absurd proposition that police in the U.S.
today are an oppressed minority group? Or the downright dangerous
proposition that the law should step in to chastise and rectify the
attitudes of a public that may not be as supportive of police
wishes and demands as cop advocates would like?